Do you or did you get hungry in the middle of the night during your pregnancy? It's 1am here and we finished dinner around 7pm. I'm hungry now, but already brushed my teeth and washed up. Lately I will wake up in the morning because I'm hungry too. What do/did you do when hunger strikes? Normally, I would just try to sleep through it, but I'm sure it means baby needs food so I'm torn between eating a snack now so I can fall asleep or just trying to sleep through it.

This didn't happen to me much but if I were you I would eat because I agree that your body is telling you it needs some fuel! I would have something high in protein like some peanut butter or a couple slices of cold cuts ( I ate cold cuts while pregnant... I'm a bad ass like that!)

Try to add a small snack right before you go to bed. It'll help maintain your blood sugar during the night, making you less likely to wake up hungry. Also, a lot of women have kept small snacks next to their bed, just in case.

This happened to me! I didn't always eat - but sometimes I would get up and eat a piece of bread... Just wait if you plan on nursing - I HAD to eat at least 2-3x in the middle of the night I was so ravenous!

Yeah, I've woken up STARVING a few times during pregnancy. I now have a small stash of granola bars by my bed, so that I don't have to go very far on those nights. I decided that if the hunger was bad enough to wake me up, it needed attention.

@shopaholic: hmm, a bunch of things, but usually something that was easy to grab. I made pumpkin choc chip muffins that I really like to eat at 3am, and breakfast bars were good, cinn raisin bread... Usually some kind of carb.

Yep -- eat! My GD diet requires me to have an evening snack 10-12 hours before breakfast, so I always have to time things that way. The problem is, now that I'm waking up so frequently, I'm hungry AFTER that snack. And I can't eat because it will screw up my morning numbers. It makes me feel so weird and wrong to not eat when I feel hungry, but that's what the doctor ordered apparently.

I talked to my OB on Friday because I have been so crazy hungry, and she said she had to get up in the middle of the night to eat through her current pregnancy! If an OB can do it, so can you Eat away, my friend.

@zippylef: Thanks. I sometimes have PB with my apples at night. I should probably do that every night. Even though I'm in 3rd tri, I had to admit my food aversions towards most proteins is still pretty high. It's like any kind of meats and eggs, etc. just don't want to go down or make me want to gag.

@ladyfingers: Ugh, GD be damned... I had my usual night snack before bed (with insulin) and I woke up around 3:45 am with my stomach growling for the first time today. I tested my sugar and I thought I was crashing but nope, 87. I couldn't go back to bed hungry so I ate five Wheat Thins and when I tested again around 6am when it was time to wake up, got 86! I say if you or your baby, or both of you, are starving, eat! Screw those numbers! Just make a note on your log if you have one. It sounds worse to deprive your baby of nutrients than to worry about morning fasting numbers.

ps - I'm only 13 weeks along so I can only imagine how much worse this is going to get...

@mizjl: True! I'm lucky in that I haven't needed meds so far (and hopefuly at 36 weeks I won't). When I'm starving and can't sleep and need to slip in an extra snack, I try to focus on eating something very low-carb (like a Nature Valley Granola Thin, I'm addicted to the dark chocolate ones and they have like 10g of carb so it's only half a serving) or no-carb (cheese stick, Atkins protein shake) to fill me up.